Ha ha. In Sydney, at least, this is a joke.
While it got a lot better I remember my first ride in 2006 from the airport into town.
The cabbie was texting away while rushing down the autobahn with 160 (km/h). Scary.
At least he only overcharged me by about 50%, which wasn't too bad for Prague at that time.
Funny story involving Prague mayor...
Rather, I think that the deal is that taxi regulators work with taxi companies and taxi drivers. Day in and day out, for, at this point, generations. Taxi companies and taxi drivers advocate for their interests and beliefs, as of course they do and should, both to the people in their local Taxi and Limousine Commission or local equivalent, and also to city councilors and such on the fairly rare occasions when those people take up taxi regulation.
The size of the market is to a large degree irrelevant. The taxi companies are going to advocate their interests -- mostly informally and without thinking of themselves as lobbying -- whether they're in a $5 million market or a $50 million market. It doesn't really matter how big objectively the taxi market is -- however big it is, it's their livelihood.
Taxi regulatory practices will be subjected to democratic scrutiny only rarely. Honestly, prior to Uber bringing all this into the spotlight, how much thought did you give to taxi regulations? Most people I've spoken do didn't even know what a medallion system entailed. It's a minor and bureaucratic subject that the ordinary people are typically uninterested in. Similarly, government officials who want to make a big showy example of rooting out corruption probably do not gravitate to TLC jobs -- it's just not that big a deal, and not that high profile.
In that environment, you'll often see a slow process of regulatory capture. And indeed, it's hard to argue that the taxi industry was not marked by regulatory capture.
But it's a mistake to imagine, because of that, a shadowy cabal of well-heeled businessmen with a gigantic presence behind them. Uber is the big business, not the taxi companies. The taxi companies have had a cushy deal, but that's through a slow accretion of generations of largely informal "lobbying," not a backroom power-brokering deal.
All I meant is that there is some fixed cost to lobbying local government for favorable regulations regardless of community size, and it's probably not worth it for local governments which are too small to have a sizable taxi market.
> Honestly, prior to Uber bringing all this into the spotlight, how much thought did you give to taxi regulations?
A fair amount, but that's because I read a lot of libertarian stuff, and taxi regulations have been a major topic of libertarian economics as a textbook example of regulatory capture (perhaps second only to tariffs) for much longer than Uber has existed. The Machinery of Freedom, a popular libertarian book proposing a legal system without government, discusses taxi regulations at length, and it was first published in the 1970s. Libertarianism aside, I think taxis have always had a reputation in pop culture for being bad experiences, but I agree that the economic and political debates we see now involving ridesharing were never common.